Film

How to spell film

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce film

What does film mean?

1. nounA motion picture; a story or recording presented as moving images.
2. nounA thin layer or coating covering a surface.
3. verbTo record moving images of something with a camera.

Film in a sentence

• noun

  The film we watched last night was nearly three hours long.

• noun

  A greasy film had settled over the kitchen worktop.

• verb

  The crew planned to film the wedding from two angles.

• noun

  Critics praised the director's latest film at the festival.

• noun

  She wiped the thin film of dust from the screen.

• verb

  They will film the interview in the studio tomorrow.

Where does film come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends from the Old English filmen, which meant a thin skin or membrane, the sort of fine layer that covers an organ or forms on the surface of a liquid. That sense traces back to a Germanic root related to fell, meaning an animal hide, so the original idea was always something thin stretched across a surface. For most of its history film simply meant a delicate coating or layer, and you can still see that in phrases like a film of dust or a film of oil. When photography developed in the nineteenth century, the light-sensitive coating on plates and flexible strips was naturally called film, and from there the word came to mean the moving pictures themselves by the early twentieth century. The spelling has stayed remarkably stable; the only trap is that the final consonant cluster lm can sound like an extra syllable in speech, but nothing is doubled or silent.

How the word is built

• film (single root from Old English filmen: thin skin or membrane); no prefix or suffix